Using semantics to discover web services based on partial data: an update of previous research

Authors

Abstract

We developed an algorithm and a proof-of-concept tool to help business analysts search a pool of hundreds or thousands of services to find the closest ones to their needs when they are composing business processes, even when an exact match does not exist. We achieve this by semantically annotating the services with properties from an ontology, while, traditionally, only the concepts are used. This enables us to generate finer-grained partial semantic mappings between a query and the signature of the services published in a registry, despite potentially different parameter cardinalities and types. Our searches return a ranked list of those services available in the registry that most closely match the query specification. The analyst can then study the hits to see which of the suggested alternatives is more convenient. Such an approach is fundamental to effectively manage reuse in large service-oriented deployments, where the number of services in the registry becomes too voluminous for browsing individually or even syntactic searches that rely on some degree of memorization by the analyst.

Keywords

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), Semantic Web Services, OWL-S, matching service descriptions

Subject

Semantic services

Journal

International Journal of IT/Business Alignment and Governance, Steven De Haes, Wim Van Grembergen, March 2014